It dawned with the warmest winter on record in the United States. And when the sun sets this New Year's Eve, the decade of the 2000s will end as the warmest ever on global temperature charts.

Warmer still, scientists say, lies ahead.

Through 10 years of global boom and bust, of breakneck change around the planet, of terrorism, war and division, all people everywhere under that warming sun faced one threat together: the buildup of greenhouse gases, the rise in temperatures, the danger of a shifting climate, of drought, weather extremes and encroaching seas, of untold damage to the world humanity has created for itself over millennia.

As the decade neared its close, the U.N. gathered presidents and premiers of almost 100 nations for a "climate summit" to take united action, to sharply cut back the burning of coal and other fossil fuels.

Read who story here (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/decade_s_end_climate)

Yet another report claims that temperatures have remained constant over the last 10 years.

The decadal correlation strengths (r-squared) of both the Hadley and MSU satellite with the corresponding CO2 is non-existent (r2=0.00). If you start in 2000 at the coldest point of the last decade, this does not significantly change (r2=0.01 for the Hadley and r2=0.08 for MSU). These numbers also do not change if you use the Scripps seasonally adjusted CO2 values (r2=0.00 for both the decadal Hadley and MSU). The correlation since 2000 stays at r2=0.01 for the Hadley but drops to r2=0.05 for the MSU using this seasonally adjusted CO2.

The challenge of course will be that a decade (or 7 years) is not a fair test, longer term monitoring is required to determine real trends. My response is that we are being told by Al Gore and James Hansen that the problem is worse than the IPCC and the scientists feared. That we are rapidly nearing the tipping point and that unless we take painful action immediately, temperatures will run away from us. If that was the case we should see some correlation even in the short term. It doesn’t take an advanced science degree to see there has been virtually no trend in the temperature data in the last decade or this century even as CO2 has increased 5.5%. Even the IPCC head Dr. Rajendra Pachauri has noticed the disconnect and acknowledged we have to look and see if natural forces were somehow countering greenhouse warming.